Broadband. Who's the Cheapest? Article Discussion Area

manrow

espresso, thanks for the idea. But I cannot get the link (Netmeter) to open; can you just check and advise please?

espresso

manrow wrote:

espresso, thanks for the idea. But I cannot get the link (Netmeter) to open; can you just check and advise please?

Just checked the link and it works fine here!

MickKnipfler

espresso wrote:

Use Netmeter which is free.

:T

Since the demise of E7even, I have been on dialup. I need to take out broadband again though. Will Netmeter work on dial up so that I can estimate what cap is suitable?

espresso

MickKnipfler wrote:

Since the demise of E7even, I have been on dialup. I need to take out broadband again though. Will Netmeter work on dial up so that I can estimate what cap is suitable?

Yes it works fine on dial up as it can be set to monitor All Interfaces in the options.

:T

mrJ_5

... thing to remember is, that as dialup is slow, you will be consuming a lot less bandwidth in a time period - so if you had an hour to kill, you could do so much more with broadband

espresso

mrJ wrote:

... thing to remember is, that as dialup is slow, you will be consuming a lot less bandwidth in a time period - so if you had an hour to kill, you could do so much more with broadband

Agreed and ISP's should raise their pathetic caps when upgrading users to an 8Mb service.

:mad:

JohalaReewi

Rex_Mundi wrote:

That has got to be a joke! Where were they voted for this award?

Have a look at the Plusnet forum to see what users of this service are saying. There are not a lot of happy people there!

As a long term Plusnet customer I can honestly say that customer support has taken a nose dive over the last year. Plusnet have been their own worst enemy by revamping the web and telephone support making it harder to get to a real person and taking longer to responf to help request. At the same time, they have been rolling out MaxDSL and LLU projects which have not gone well and left many users with patchy or no broadband connection and no way of getting support. The ADSL Plusnet forum turned into a Plusnet bashing forum, but a look at the official Plusnet User Group forum is not rosy either. http://usergroup.plus.net/forum/

JohalaReewi

MoneySpendingExpert wrote:

Has anybody checked out Sky Broadband?

We are curently looking into bundling our internet/phone service at home.

Every comparision site I look at does not mention Sky Broadband, yet it appears to be significantly cheaper than the likes of BT, Talk Talk et al.

We have been with PIPEX for some years now and have always got a good service, however our recent investigations have identifed a monthly saving of £15/month based upon the SKY Max package (heavy usage) including unlimited anytime UK calls.

I am missing something or is it because the offer is so new?

Would appreciate comments

A few things to watch with Sky broadband:

1. It is not available in all areas. If you are not in a Sky broadband area, you will be offered Sky Connect (upto 8M over a BT line) at £17 a month until Sky broadband is available.

2. Sky broadband uses a modified router so you can't use any old ADSL modem, you have to use the one from Sky.

3. There are stories of email problems. Worth checking the Sky forum at ADSLguide.

http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=sky

In_Deo_Omnia

O boy, Have I had some major problems with Talk Talk and Tiscali.

Been with Tiscali for over a year now. The problem started when my broadband kept cutting off intermittently, every Sunday it seemed. After calibrating my computer 20 times, thinking there must be a problem with my computer, I realized it was my ISP which had the problem, I'm not sure what the problem was I just kept getting the amber colour on my router, instead of green. I did waste money by ringing Tiscali Technical on a 0870 number, you end up speaking to someone in India and it seems they drag the conversation out to keep you on the phone, I wonder what their motive is for that? Anyway didn't get anywhere with them just going round and round testing and re-testing and after 15 mins on the phone to them they say, sorry it's a problem with our connection. I wonder how many other people had the same problem and rang them. Not only that my so called 2mg connection speed was up and down like a yo yo, one day I would get full 240kbps download speed and the next day it would be 50kbps download, this would happen all the time.

The other thing with Tiscali is they have a fair usage policy, which is fair I guess but to my surprise I had an email saying I was breeching the fair use policy, how I thought?, I checked my usage and I was well below the 30g limit a month. Well if you use P2P file sharing, which they allow you to do so, if you use it in the hours of 6pm to 11pm Mon-Sun, your breeching your contract.

I decided to change over to Talk Talk, BIG mistake. You can ring them up on a free phone number and get through immediately, only if you want to sign up though, and of course, give your bank details. If you wish to ring Technical or check the status of your order however, you ring a 0870 number and get put on hold indefintly, nice. I agreed to their free broadband package although I wouldn’t have been given any broadband for another 3 months, cause of the waiting list, apparently! They were going to change my landline over from BT to theirs within a couple of weeks, with the call package of course.

I had no response off Talk Talk for 3 weeks, so I managed to get through to customer services, they told me my broadband order had come back as an error and they had to re-provision the line, which will take another 3 weeks, they said it was because I had CPS on my phone, “carrier pre selection”, meaning, I had my out going calls with Tiscali and my land line with BT, so I changed my out going calls to BT thinking this would solve the problem. Still trying to get through to confirm the order I was getting obnoxious emails off Talk Talk customer services, some immature girl talking absolute rubbish, so I cancelled the order and I’m so glad I did because it wasn’t the CPS that was stopping the transfer from Tiscali to Talk Talk, it was the LLU on my line. That would of be really good, waiting another 3 weeks to find they still cant put the order in and Talk Talk cant tell you why and you have loads of hassle getting through.

To conclude I decided to go with AOL broadband silver, free router, no connection charge, and unlimited download at any time and the first month free, oh and they don’t put an LLU on your line and they give Mac codes out. Problem was they couldn’t place the order until this LLU was taken off the line by Tiscali and only Tisacli can do this. My broadband was cut off on the 2nd of Aug; Tiscali said 10-15 working days, three weeks, to clear the line, so I waited the three weeks. I called AOL and they still couldn’t order me broadband cause Tiscali still haven’t took this tag off my line. So I rang Tiscali on the 23rd of Aug asking why this hasn’t been took off the line, sorry they said it’s come back on our system as error on the 15th Aug, incompatible product cannot clean the line, what!

Tiscali said we will have to re-send the order so they can manually take the LLU off the line, but they didn’t inform me on the 15th I waited the full three weeks till the 23rd. Anyway I got a bit suspicious about it all and rang them back on the 28th of Aug only to find out that they had put through the wrong post code on the order, that’s why it come back as error so instead of correcting this on the 23rd, when I rang back they said we will have to re-send the order, they re-sent it all right but with the same wrong post code, absolutely brilliant, yeah right!

So finally on the 1st of September Tiscali have now put the order into BT wholesale with the right address and Tiscali say my line will be clear or at least BT whole sale will have the cease order by the 12th of Sept, and then of course it will take BT 7 days to clear the line then another 10 days to get my new broadband service, if all goes to plan I should be on broadband again on the 29th of Sept. I’ve had two months with no broadband because of customer services who have incompetents and obstinacy mixed together. Some people will say, I might as well stay will my old provider cause I can’t do will loosing broadband for that long, and that’s exactly what these fat cat ISP directors want, Oh on, I’d rather go to hell and back just to make a point and never ever go back to them. The reason I’m extra annoyed is that I have a website which is an online business that remotely connects to other peoples PC’S to diagnose their computer problems and no internet and especially no broadband is giving me a great lose each day.

I’m on AOL dial up at the moment, anytime, first month free, so I should be ready for broadband within that time.

Sorry for the long post, two months of grief in one post 

tightrs

dont forget virgin http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=254243